Recently, I ran into an issue with a Retention Policy setup in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center. If you are new to the Security and Compliance Center (SAC), it allows you to manage data compliance across your entire 365 tenant. This centralized portal was recently rolled-out as part of the Office 365 feature set. Where retention policies differ in Security and Compliance versus the Exchange Admin Center, is that policies in SAC can be set up to retain data beyond e-mails. SAC can retain e-mails, public folders, team conversations, OneDrive and Sharepoint documents, etc.

Now on to the issue. Within the Security and Compliance Center, the policy was showing a Status of On but with Errors. The error stated 1 Distribution result(s) found with the Location being Exchange and the Details of Recipient Not Found. Unfortunately, this data didn’t provide me with enough information to remedy the error.

To get more descriptive details, we need to connect to the Security and Compliance Center through Powershell.

Connect to Exchange Admin Center and Security and Compliance Center via Powershell

First, we will connect to the Exchange Admin Center through Powershell. To do so, open Powershell as an administrator and run the following commands.

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

$UserCredential = Get-Credential

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session

Next, we will connect to Security and Compliance Center module.

# Get login credentials

$UserCredential = Get-Credential

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.compliance.protection.outlook.com/powershell-liveid -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session -AllowClobber -DisableNameChecking   $Host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = $UserCredential.UserName + ” (Office 365 Security & Compliance Center)”

Now that we are connected to the SAC, we will check the status of the retention policy. In this instance, the policy was named Retain. 

Get-RetentionCompliancePolicy –Identity “YourPolicyName” -Distributiondetail | FL

Here under DistributionResults we can see where the error originates. In our case, the issue was with  Public Folders. This particular organization had set the policy to retain Public Folders, however, no Public Folders existed in the organization.

Microsoft Docs – Connect to Exchange Online